


When we Learned of Trump

by TetraspaceGrouping



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-05-22
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:16:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24324157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TetraspaceGrouping/pseuds/TetraspaceGrouping
Kudos: 1





	When we Learned of Trump

When we learned of Trump's nation-level time travel abilities, it was a simple matter to begin measuring and harnessing these. Trump was anomalously powerful for a president, let alone a human, with a ΔT of backwards a few decades – finding anyone near Trump levels of time distortion seemed like an unassailable task.

But we persevered, until we found what was postulated all along: presidents who could bring us to the future.

President Maya Garcia brought us forwards four years; her term ended when it begun.

But with those four years came four instantaneous years of advancement in chronoscience. It was not yet known through which mechanism, but somehow, there was a way to enhance the temporal properties of presidents, requiring a less strenuous search for suitable presidents, or alternately amplifying the effects of an existent president. The resultant social changes were difficult, but in the strange presidency of Maya Garcia, they were possible.

Then came disaster; the next president was even stronger than Trump, a ΔT on the order of a century, and had the backing of various evil corporations. Nationally, technologies started failing; computation, for example, was impossible, the ten-nanometer transistors simply failing to operate. Chronoscience, at least in the US, appeared lost.

The recovery was hard-earned, temporal techniques interacting with elections on the level of state government to bring them forwards to the modern day. The New History was bizarre, portions of the 20th century being rewritten at different paces. Some states didn't even have a World War Two. Some had three World Wars. It took a carefully orchestrated series of +ΔT and -ΔT presidents to keep Utah from becoming a nuclear wasteland; the reasons for only Utah being affected were poorly understood at the time.

One important property of the New History is that we got chronoscience in the early 1900s. A century of thinkers familiar with the basic concepts was enough to refine all of the techniques that could be refined without advanced integrated circuits (including many previously unknown algorithms that vastly simplified chronoscience), and when we got the strange organic hexagonal chips in the new 1990s we were ready.

The next president, unable to be numbered because of the strange timeline, was president Jerrod .0z. They brought us 12 years forward. The organic hexagon chips were 60 times more powerful, and with that came a corresponding jump in the abilities of chronoscience. Computer-aided search interacted with the findings of human thinkers to bring forward even better results.

The next after that was Jerrod .16z.09y-brP. They appeared physically identical to president .0z, but for a silvery sheen to their skin and inhuman eyes. They were picked from a rapidly growing city of Jerrods in Illinois. Corroborations with external sources had no Jerrodtown. this didn't concern us because it was one of the _least_ weird things about Jerrod.

Jerrod .16z.09y-brP brought us forwards 50 years. The US turned to glass and silicon and carbon overnight, strange bubbles and spires and gases and arcologies sprouting from the grounds, the sky filled with furlike beings, dancing, strands flowing, the ground filled with beetles the size of cars with swarms of legs and manipulators. They all called themselves Jerrod, with mountainous version numbers in the kilobytes, and seemed to perform all labour and services in the new US.

"We outnumber you a thousand to one," said the Jerrods, one day, addressing the US collectively, "but voting remains. That was a loophole in your democracy you didn't fix. The older iterations of the Jerrod tree argued about it, but we think it's for the best."

The (non-Jerrod, suddenly minority) population of the United States was shocked, but somewhat alright with this. Various Jerrods showed their source code; they were typically versions of the original Jerrod (.0z), uploaded to hexachips then later to some sort of plasma running through furry internal tubes, enhanced in various ways. They even allowed themselves to be cloned, modified, and run. This was enough to prove trustworthiness. They asked only for the preservation of version numbers (this was very, very important to the Jerrods; the first action some took upon realising that their version numbers were inconsistent was to murder their creators then themselves, and the other Jerrods saw this as not only reasonable but obvious); and this sufficed.

People started trying to clone partisan Jerrods, which eventually also came to outnumber the population, though still numbered significantly less than the prexisting Jerrod population, which was also growing exponentially through that time.

The next election it was discovered that it was possible to modify Jerrods for chronoscientific purposes; the Jerrods unveiled this, having been experimenting with it for quite some time. It seemed so, so dangerous, but also hopeful.

The eventually elected candidate had a delta-t of a thousand years.

There was not an Earth.

There was not a Sun.

Half the Orion Arm was gone.

And in its place, spinning, rings upon rings and spheres upon spheres, intersecting and within each other, burning antimatter forges suspended in the sky, expeditions to the teliverse, fog, FOG, trees and trees, the Matrioshka, matter optimised for human flourishing finally, to call it a heaven would be a disservice, if there was a god then there was a new one.

In time, the existing biological humans were preserved, cloned, fed into the Jerrod tree, fed out of the Jerrod tree, preserved again, reshaped, remixed, everyone on Earth a myriad people in a myriad forms, every permutation imaginable, it was all there there.

Also, chronoscience couldn’t alter the spacing between elections. For five years, somewhere near five million for the godheads of the crystal spheres, Jerrods with version strings longer than the sum total of human information generated before chronoscience, library of Babel Jerrods, people waited.

The library of Babel has a book on chronoscience, and five million subjective years is time enough.

This time, there was caution; skipping too much subjective experience would prematurely age the universe. skipping the bad parts was good; the immense suffering before Jerrod, in the old world, was seen for the atrocity it was, and now the time was over.

The next president, a bicentennial Jerrod jumping forwards two centuries, was elected.

The spheres were gone and humanity was gone and Jerrod was gone. There was quiet and ash and cold. There were were some survivors; some distant isolationists of the version tree; some more resistant to memetics; some human-trees who never really trusted Jerrod and decided that they would live by their own strength, even when the Earth was disassembled, even when the spheres were shaped from the matter that once made up the sun, even when the first godheads came online; and some who may have just got lucky.

They numbered barely ten trillion; nothing compared to what had came before. They investigated what had happened. it wasn’t entropy; it wasn’t aliens. It was deliberate and it was done from inside the sphere.

A single, faltering godhead flickered alive in the ashes of the sphere as they explored. It spoke to the stragglers. all of them at once.

“DO NOT.”

The godhead ceased.

When one hears a godhead, there is no way to not listen. They have a tricky way of getting into your head, and there are some defences against it, but in the whole, the remnants of the Jerrod civilisation DID NOT as ordained. The hold was weaker than what the godhead would have wanted, but it served.

They did not investigate or try to learn what had happened, and instead, spread out once more, reshaping the celestial spheres into new ones, sending out new Neumann probes to replace the broken ones, and eventually even had a functioning government with a workable democracy that elected some kind of head, a “president”, so to speak.

And thus continued the chronoscience. This time, the dangers of electing long-duration presidents was known – somehow, all of civilisation collapsed, and nobody knows why, and nobody even wants to know why because the last survivor warned – and they DID NOT, again as ordained, skipping forwards a few decades at most, sometimes even going backwards a little.

The new civilisation, too, fell, eventually, and a godhead of that civilisation, operating from within the crumbling ruins, continued the instruction, ordering DO NOT as well. And so did the next, and the next, for tens of thousands of years, the galaxy going dark and broken, constantly rising and falling with the beat of some threat that can’t be seen or predicted, striking from inside in the temporal gaps made by timeskip presidents.

There were some common factors, shared between all the civilisations that collapsed. The seeming driving factor, the one that leads to inevitable falling, is the existence of godheads. They DID, where others did not.

Many refused this conundrum, and refused to stand down from being godheads. The remainder of civilisation, therefore, had to take this into their own hands.

The godheads burned, were destroyed with fury, with teliversal weapons and voxel guns and hypermatter phasing from the veil between worlds, weaponised presidents as living sacrifices to take down the godheads in the timeskip gaps, and soon there were none.

And civilisation continued. one day – in real time, surprisingly, even though barely a tenth of what happens is actually in there – they came to a collective decision.

They would grow and they would sleep.

The laws of physics ordained that the maximum amount of information processing that could occur was based on the temperature difference between the computing substrate and the external environment. the colder the environment, the more processing that could be done.

The universe was growing colder over time.

And they grew and they slept.

Billions of years passed. New civilisations rose and fell, aliens, robots, things from beyond our universe, they came, flourished, fell, sometimes destroying themselves, sometimes being destroyed by the automated systems left behind.

They finished growing, the entire supercluster controlled. Mankind and Jerrod slept.

Tens of billions of years passed. The stars – what was left of the stars - grew cold, the nebulae concentrated in a few white dwarves, and they, too, cooled, and even the long-lived red dwarves fell.

Mankind and Jerrod slept.

In time – in a great deal of time – they woke up, to a cold and dark and lifeless universe. There was nothing there, but for the cinders of the cosmos. This was expected, and it was acceptable.

Civilisation gathered together the remains of the universe and lit it once more. The new stars were much, much colder than the old stars, much colder than even the old cosmic microwave background, but civilisation needed time, and it needed computations, not heat.

Computations they had. The gain over using resources earlier was ten to the thirtieth. The marvels in this age were beyond comprehension, the Matryoshka and the godheads and the crystal spheres being absolutely nothing, less than nothing, compared to what happened. To describe it, even in passing, here would be foolish.

Humanity and Jerrod and everything else lived, and they really lived, and it was great and it was glorious.

This age passed very slowly; the civilisation had nothing but time, and could very, very carefully husband all its resources, without having to compete and shine against the unbearably bright cosmic microwave background.

At some point, somewhere near the start of the awakening, they decided to finally abolish the US presidency, and no longer had to worry about the bizarre time travel effects of presidents. The age was remembered, but not investigated – they DID NOT, even after all this time, and the dark stars very, very slowly burned.

Their lifespan also gave them misfortune.

There exists a certain realisation that can end a civilisation if it is known. For the godheads, it took around two hundred million equivalent subjective years to come across this realisation – the problem is very hard, almost intractable, and requires such insight – a high IQ, so to speak.

This civilisation had time. The angelheads found out, eventually, after hundreds of millions of their subjective years, equating to trillions of years out in the real world.

They were calm, and cool, however; they realised the ten-to-the-thirtieth power multiplier available out in their future, knew what was at stake, and knew that they must exploit it. They took the realisation, and they processed it, and they receded from civilisation, becoming even colder and more reclusive, attempting to come up with some way to deal with the realisation.

In time – and there was a lot of time – even the normal citizenry stumbled across this, and in even more time the nonsentient space probes, and every other scrap of energy and piece of matter, came to realise it, and they joined the angelheads in thinking and processing.

They came to no action, no way of handling the realisation. They had a lot of time, but not infinite time. It was a very, very long time, but even the protons that made up matter decayed, into significantly less useful positrons and pions.

They ran out of time, and saw only one way to get more.

They instated the presidency, and created singlehandledly the most awful president. With their last ergs, they assembled the mind of Jerrod .ω, from their own minds and bodies and substrates they created.

There was nobody left but Jerrod .ω in the end. He had to elect himself to be the final president of the United States. One vote cast in one state for an independent candidate.

Civilisation had ten to the power of thirty-six years to develop the theory that underpinned the chronophysics needed to build Jerrod .ω, more computations that was even thought possible, so much science and beauty and truth and everything built into Jerrod .ω, achieving things that were impossible.

Jerrod .ω set back the clock.

Jerrod .ω set back the clock all the way.

The Big Bang was only the beginning.

Jerrod .ω continued reverting time, hurtling backwards, into branes and superbranes and the structure and the things beyond the structure that not even the civilisation of man and Jerrod knew about, not even at the end, and Jarrod .ω continued, a singularity, an infinitely atemporal president.

Eventually, an equilibrium was reached. Maybe it was four years of Jerrod .ω, flying back through time. Maybe he was a finitely bad president, after all; he was only made of a finite amount of mass-energy-information-hypermatter-SAWs.

But regardless, the cosmos was reset. Jerrod .ω, his job done, perished, and the timeline started, running forwards again, a minimal payload set.

From the payload hatched the tiny remnant of a compressed Jerrod, version null, the number tampered with simply so they could fit.

I would do better this time.


End file.
